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The acclaimed movie Floating Life tells the story of a family of well-off ethnic Chinese who can afford to make connections to cosmopolitan cities around the world, including Vancouver. Seeking opportunity, they find themselves floating through existence, as if on an airplane, without roots.

Floating Life offers a glimpse into a profound new demographic movement. It captures the astonishing rise of “transnationals,” sometimes known as “circular migrants.” They’re the family members constantly moving back and forth between countries, largely as part of an educational and financial strategy.

Floating Life details how different members of the Hong Kong family, and their close friends, start jetting off to spend various amounts of time in Australia, Germany and Canada. Directed by Clara Law, the movie begins as a comedy, but transforms into something more unsettled.

The Hong-Kong raised director, who lives mostly in Australia, deserves credit for taking on the thorny subject of the millions of migrants, often seeking dual or triple citizenship, who maintain residences in a variety of globalized cities like Metro Vancouver, whose population is 45 per cent foreign born.

Unlike many observers, Law makes a point of being up-to-date on migration issues. While B.C. politicians apologized this year to the Chinese population for events that occurred more than 75 years ago, and Canadian readers continue to be drawn to Wayson Choi’s books, Jade Peony and All That Matters, for memories of Vancouver’s Chinatown in the 1930s and ‘40s, Law’s movie captures how migration realities, particularly for East Asians, have utterly changed.

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The United Nations Global Commission on International Migration has caught the scope of this staggering shift. It details how the migration story today is generally not the traditional one of arrival, settlement and integration. Instead, migration, especially for the affluent, has turned into a globalized trend of unprecedented mobility, porous national borders, weak loyalties, opportunism and fragmented families.

Metro Vancouver is one of the prime spots on the planet for wealthy circular migrants.

They have been welcomed eagerly by Canadian and B.C. politicians, the Asia Pacific Canada Foundation, real estate developers and high-end retailers, who consider them the global elite. Metro Vancouver hosts far more East-Asian business-class immigrants per capita than any Canadian city, according to studies from the University of B.C.

Vancouver International Airport features about a dozen jumbo passenger jets a day between Vancouver and Beijing, Hong Kong and Taiwan. UBC geographers Daniel Hiebert and David Ley found one of four immigrants in Metro Vancouver fly home each year to their country of origin. One out of five surveyed own property in their homeland.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong has more than 250,000 residents with Canadian passports (Lebanon has another 40,000), virtually all born in Asia. Many are “astronaut” patriarchs; fathers who obtained citizenship after spending a few years in Canada, before returning to East Asia to make money to send to their wife and children.

One scholarly researcher, Anita Mak, discovered Hong Kong business firms were holding open positions for favoured employees for two or three years so they could spend the requisite time in Australia or Canada to obtain a passport, before returning to work in the high-powered East Asian financial centre.

Some ethnic Chinese migrants in Richmond have told UBC researcher John Rose: “(Canadian citizenship) is more like an insurance policy.” Other transnationals refer to their years waiting in a new land for a passport as “immigration hell.”

Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life Lines, by UBC’s David Ley, is one of the most important and comprehensive books written on the phenomenon of transnational migrants, particularly those with wealth.

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The kind of migration occurring in recent decades is vastly different from the flood of Europeans who came on ships to settle North America between 1880 and 1930, says the holder of a Canadian chair in geography.

“The scale of cross-border transactions, permitted by cheap travel and electronic communication together with various innovations (including the status of dual citizenship), defines a substantially new phenomenon.”

In the 21st century, Vancouver’s Chinatown is old news, coloured by nostalgia. Instead, evidence of transnational migrants is to be found in the glitzy Chinese-signed shopping districts of central Richmond, the glass apartment towers of north False Creek (developed in large part by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing) and in the luxury condos of Coal Harbour, which Vancouver planner Andy Yan has found are often empty.

The rise of transnational migrants has led to a new scholarly vocabulary of “astronaut fathers,” “anchor babies,” “parachute kids,” “ethnoburbs” and “hyper-diverse cities.”

It’s not only rich people who make up the new circular migrants, however. The term includes the more than 400,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada, whose numbers have tripled under the federal Conservatives. They are often low- or medium-skilled newcomers.

In addition, circular migrants of all economic classes can be found in Canada’s large ethnoburbs — such as those in the ethnic Chinese enclave of Richmond, in the Punjabi heart of North Surrey and in Korean neighbourhoods in Coquitlam.

In the new book, Segmented Cities? How Urban Contexts Shape Ethnic and Nationalist Politics (UBC Press), Wan Yu and Wei Li write that expanding ethnoburbs are key enablers of transnational families. Circular migrants, for instance, often choose to live in ethnoburbs that are near international airports, to make travel home more convenient.

Regardless of their economic status, transnational migrants are regularly applauded as the wave of the global future. Sometimes they’re romanticized as the new “global elite;” even by themselves. Researchers like Ley have discovered East Asian patriarchs with property in multiple cities are keenly aware of the prestige they are regularly given by host countries.

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However, there can also be negative sides to the jet-setting life.

The movie, Floating Life, for instance, starts out as a comedy but follows some family members as they take tragic turns. Law’s film shows how it is disorienting, at the least, to follow an economic strategy based on family members collecting passports, real estate and investments around the world.

“The transnational family is often the fragmented family, with members dispersed on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean. In its purest form, the astronaut family includes a husband and father working in East Asia while his wife and children are living in Vancouver, Toronto, San Francisco or Sydney,” says Ley.

“The emotional distance of separation becomes a major bone of contention, and often triggers a crisis point in family life. Women are left as single parents in an unfamiliar environment, children are freed from patriarchal direction, and men face loneliness and the temptations of isolation in East Asia.”

Many circular migrant families never feel they belong anywhere. With respect to circular migrants from Mainland China, who make up the largest immigrant cohort in Canada, National University of Singapore researcher Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho found those who return to China are often “marginalized” — frequently referred to as “foreigners.”

In Floating Life, the consequences of family and friends spreading across the globe are at best mixed. Life does not turn out idyllically for these transnationals flying between residences, jobs and schools in East Asia, Australia, Germany and Canada.

As Chinese film scholar Stephen Teo writes about Floating Life, the unsettled characters find themselves on a strange circulatory journey “fraught with anxiety and a sense of trepidation, if not outright dread.”

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Douglas Todd: The floating life of affluent ‘transnational’ migrants

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